Code-switching as a translanguaging to transfer cross-cultural understanding in English classroom: teachers’ perception

Abstract

This study was identifying code-switching as a translanguaging to transfer cross-cultural understanding in the classroom. This study used observation to one classroom and unstructured questionnaire to seven English lecturers/ teachers qualitatively. Most of the participants used Inter-sentential Code Switching, which describes a switch of language at sentence boundary or between the sentences. They used the code-switching consciously for some factors, such as the desire to convey meaning effectively, the desire to make the communication more inclusive, the desire to improve students’ comprehension, the desire to convey the meaning contextually, the desire to emphasize the meaning or comprehension, and the desire to help EFL learners by bilingual. Moreover, the most important thing is they believe that code-switching affects English classroom positively in transferring cross-culture understanding, such as code-switching eases students to understand more to the cultural topics, code-switching can improve students’ comprehension on conceptual knowledge such as cultural activities, attitude and belief, and code-switching is useful for EFL learners where they can match their English with local wisdom.